


the rainbow in your sky

by luninosity



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Regency, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Choices, Hand Jobs, Happy Ending, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Mission Fic, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Regency Romance, Sexual Content, Stucky secret santa, True Love, standard warnings for Winter Soldier trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:41:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5522378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Why,” Steve Rogers said to Sam Wilson, “am I here?”</p><p>Sam tossed back a large gulp of rum punch—Steve hadn’t even seen the glass materialize, and they’d only just entered the room—and said, “You mean existentially, or in Lord Stark’s ballroom at this particular instant, because I can’t help you with the first, and as for the second, I’ll just remind you that you said yes to him.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	the rainbow in your sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [InterruptingDinosaur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InterruptingDinosaur/gifts).



> Title courtesy of The Front Bottoms “2yl”, which is very much a Steve Rogers song: _I could fight the rainclouds in your life/ every day and every night…_
> 
> Written for the Stucky Secret Santa 2015 Exchange, for a recipient who likes AUs. Hope you enjoy!

“Why,” Steve Rogers said to Sam Wilson, “am I here?”  
  
Sam tossed back a large gulp of rum punch—Steve hadn’t even seen the glass materialize, and they’d only just entered the room—and said, “You mean existentially, or in Lord Stark’s ballroom at this particular instant, because I can’t help you with the first, or really even the second, I’ll just remind you that you said yes to him.”  
  
“And you said yes to me,” Steve said, and wondered where Sam’d gotten the rum punch, and eyed the throng of ballgown-clad dancers. “Why are _you_ here?” Because this was Lord Anthony Stark’s annual holiday extravaganza, the dancers were less dressed and the punch far stronger than at most rather more proper Society musicales and soirees. Steve had dressed up to blend in, and regretted the current fashion for high starched collars intensely.  
  
“I’m here because you’re my friend and I support you,” Sam said earnestly, “and I also support Tony’s wine cellar.” But he glanced around the crowd as he said it; he, like Steve, knew why the yes, and to which him, in the coruscating turn-of-the-century throng. A nineteenth century. Barely twenty years old, still shiny and new.  
  
Steve stuck a finger under his cravat. Tugged. Itchy.  
  
“Stop that,” Sam admonished.  
  
“Find our espionage artist, then.”  
  
“Hey, you’re the Captain. Captain away.”  
  
Steve gazed out at the riot of color, of couples meeting each other for country dances, of red and gold draperies and jewel-bedecked live trees hung with a clever indoor drip system and evident wealth on display. Tony Stark had the money, and the willingness to flaunt said money; Society regarded him with a kind of horrified adoration, as he cheerfully defied all usual niceties and yet managed to charm every person he met. Tonight he’d been chattering eagerly to anyone in earshot about his new invention, a sort of flying-machine, a follow-up to the steam-engines he’d dived into joyously last year.  
  
This, of course, was why Steve’d come.  
  
The Home Office, in the person of Nicholas Fury, had suggested that someone might be planning to steal Tony’s designs and sell them to the highest bidder. In the wake of the recent Continental wars, this could not be allowed to happen; Steve ran the finger under his cravat again.  
  
Still itchy. Damn. At least hair-powder’d gone out of fashion; it’d never worked with his fairness anyway.  
  
Stark’d invented a kind of temporary hair-dye a month or so ago, offhandedly, while working on a formula for more efficient room-painting; half the men and women in the room sported violet or turquoise or primrose shimmers, the more fashionable even mixing multiple colors, as if tropical flowers had unexpectedly blossomed in a Society townhome ballroom mid-winter. Steve’s fingertips begged to paint them in glowing rainbow hues.  
  
He did—in a strange sort of way—like Tony Stark. The man could be flippant and abrasive, but then so could Steve; the man had money, which Steve had not had until recent employment by the Home Office, but Tony Stark would give his life to defuse a bomb, Steve thought, if it came to that, if it’d save others. Likely while making a joke, and complaining about shoddy engineering; but he’d do it all the same. Steve respected that.  
  
Steve also did not like the idea of someone stealing another man’s work. Just in general: no.  
  
“Mingle,” he said to Sam, or started to say; Sam had found the young scientist Scott Lang and a girl in a low-cut periwinkle-froth dress whom Steve did not recognize, and seemed to be doing just fine on his own.  
  
He wandered the ballroom. He stepped on a few shoes, and let himself be noticed: big clumsy adorable war-hero Captain, bashfully refusing dances on the grounds of having two left feet, generally radiating earnest geniality.  
  
He said hello to Miss Darcy Lewis, and to some sort of Scandinavian royalty, who seemed to be escorting the lady scientist Doctor Jane Foster, recently named head of the Academy. He bowed politely to Pepper Potts, Lord Stark’s long-term companion; long-suffering, Steve considered, though with affection. None of them counted as suspects.  
  
He ducked noiselessly out a side door—no one noticed the good Captain departing, just as no one heard the shadow that snuck around the townhome’s grounds and back garden for a good half hour—and eventually back in.  
  
He spotted the First Minister and the Secretary across the room. Tony Stark’s parties—scarlet and gilt décor notwithstanding—glittered with influential people, some of whom came to drink. Some of them came for alibis. Some of them came to slip quietly into a back room or a library, where nobody’d be looking, and have intense conversations that could steer the course of a realm.  
  
The Secretary looked a bit like Steve, he’d been told by some well-meaning persons; he could vaguely see the resemblance, and yet Alexander Pierce’s blue eyes had always raised the hairs at the back of his neck, along his forearm. He’d never been sure why.  
  
Tonight the Secretary had a companion: a younger man with long dark hair and broad shoulders who nevertheless seemed astonishingly docile, lingering beside his—master, no better word—like a desireless pale shade. Steve paused, attention caught. He couldn’t say by what.  
  
He drifted that way, drawn like the tide.  
  
Same-sex partnerships were no longer very astonishing in this blasé new world; Steve himself had never been astonished. Steve had had—  
  
Steve and Bucky had—  
  
That way led noplace good. That way led to memories and grief like a splinter lodged in his chest; like ice and the side of a Stark-invention train in snowy mountains and the slide of Sergeant James Barnes’ hand away, Steve’s reach too late and too short.  
  
Bucky, he thought, and closed his eyes against the hurt, though it did no good; the hurt came as it always came, never any less. Oh, Bucky.  
  
It’d been war. People died in war.  
  
Steve’s heart had died in that war. At that moment. He’d never been warm again; he thought sometimes he’d fallen too and drowned in ice.  
  
The man with the Secretary had the same color hair as Bucky, he thought dully. More muscle—no, not all muscle. Something different about the left arm under the evening suit. Heavier. The young man wore black and white, eschewing present poppy-bright trends. Steve wore black and white too. He’d not cared. A mission.  
  
The Secretary had a hand on the nape of the man’s neck: casually proprietary. As Steve watched the hand tightened. The man did not protest, only remained passive, as if all the fight’d gone away a long time ago.  
  
Alexander Pierce laughed, and made a gesture, a quite astoundingly rude one coming from a man in his position; from the tilt of his head, the motion, he seemed to be offering his companion’s services.  
  
And Steve would not interfere with anyone’s consensual sexual choices, no; everyone was entitled to their own, and he’d fight to defend that truth if he had to, and he had, on more than one occasion.  
  
But every last one of his instincts screamed at him, as he watched that hand. They shouted that this was _not right_ —  
  
Pierce used the hand on the man’s neck to give him a small shake, as one might a disobedient puppy, and then shoved him away in the direction of the punch bowl. The man did not stumble—he moved as if he’d had training, flexible and strong—but caught himself and turned and took a step. Two.  
  
And Steve saw his face. Steve saw his eyes.  
  
The ballroom faded to white. Sounds blurred, indistinct.  
  
The only color, the only reality, stood out in Bucky Barnes’ face and shape: dark hair, pale skin, cool winter-blue eyes, grey-blue, a blue that used to be delighted by scientific fiction and entertained by Steve’s stubbornness and radiant when Steve moved inside him.  
  
Steve shivered out, “Bucky…?”  
  
Bucky Barnes blinked at him.  
  
“Bucky,” Steve pleaded. Sound rushed back in, a dizzying kaleidoscope. “Bucky.”  
  
“Who the hell is Bucky,” Bucky said, but his eyes had gone a bit distant, as if searching for a long-lost memory. The elderly matron a few steps away gasped at the profanity; they both ignored this.  
  
“Do I know you?” Bucky’s voice came surprisingly soft, hesitant but deadly: ready to throw knives if threatened but right now interested. “Sir?”  
  
“You know me,” Steve whispered. He knew Bucky. Whatever act of science or magic or divine intervention had stepped in, he’d always know Bucky. He couldn’t believe it, but it was real; even if it weren’t, if he were hallucinating or dying somehow, he’d choose this vision of the world over any other. He’d forever choose the world with Bucky in it. “You always knew me. You always saw me—Bucky, please. How are you—how did you—never mind, you’re _here_ —”  
  
Dark eyebrows drew together. He was wearing gloves, expensive as the rest of his ensemble but heavy and concealing. Pierce must’ve spent a fortune on the classic elegance of their outfits, but Bucky didn’t need the embellishment.  
  
Bucky murmured, “I’m here to—he asked me to—do you work for him as well?”  
  
“No.” His throat felt dry. He swallowed. Like swallowing bone. “I’m Steve. Steve Rogers, do you remember? You—we were friends.” And more. So much more. But this new miraculous Bucky looked at him as if Steve might be lying, and that cut worse than the ice-dreams ever had.  
  
“Steve.” Bucky tasted the name. Light glimmered through his eyelashes: newfangled electric lamps painted him in clear pools of luminescence. “I don’t remember…sometimes I have trouble. Remembering.” He lifted a hand, touched his temple: an explanation. “I was…he told me I was hurt. During the war. I don’t remember well. Sometimes I forget what he asks me to do. And then he—”  
  
Another pause. Back to formality in the bustling ballroom: “If we’ve met and I don’t remember you, I’m sorry…”  But his voice trailed off, a slight frown appearing. As if he did remember something, Steve thought. As if he were trying.  
  
“You don’t have to be sorry,” Steve whispered, Steve apologized, Steve begged for forgiveness. Years too late. “I left you—I let you die—only you weren’t dead—” He choked on the awfulness of it. “I’m so sorry, Buck—”  
  
“You let me die?” A head-tilt, quizzical. “I thought I died for—but that wasn’t right, he told me…I was on a mission. He saved me when I was. Dying. He told me I was his and he’d help me and he gave me the arm…” Metal whirred: a faint susurration, not unfriendly, as Bucky gestured, a small lift of that left hand. The glove concealed too well; Steve could only guess at the engineering, the precision, the clockwork gears underneath.  
  
Alive, he thought. That thought hammered away the rest and left only crystal joy behind.  
  
Bucky was here—terribly changed, but _here_ —and Steve Rogers could breathe again.  
  
“I thought I died,” Bucky said, puzzled now, “I remember—falling. Thinking it was—not all right, of course not, but—being glad it was me and not—someone else. Someone I’d stepped in front of. A minute before. To—protect, I think. Was I protecting someone?”  
  
“Me.” The tears burned like snow. He welcomed the pain. “We were on a train—one of Stark’s ridiculous high-speed monsters—and we were at war, and I took a hit and went down, and you stood in front of me, and you were so—and you saved me, and then the train—the explosion, and—and I went back, I did go back, I looked for your body but—” He bit his lip, tasted blood, let the hurt be an anchor. Bucky seemed to be hearing this story for the first time.  
  
“We always promised,” Steve breathed hopelessly. “Until the end of the line.”  
  
Bucky’s eyes changed, then.  
  
“Buck?”  
  
“I…” A headshake; no, more: shaking everywhere. “I still don’t—I’m not—I’m not him, I don’t _remember_ —”  
  
Steve swore internally at his own stupid need to push. Selfish and impatient and stubborn, and he’d frightened this miraculous Bucky, and— “That’s fine. That’s—I’m not trying to hurt you, Bucky, I’m sorry, it’s fine if you don’t—”  
  
“I’m not him!” The cry was loud enough, anguished enough, that ball-guests glanced around. The Secretary’s eyes sharpened. Bucky lowered his voice. “I’m not—I don’t think—I’m sorry, I can’t be him for you—”  
  
“Don’t go—”  
  
The Secretary started their way. Got impeded by red hair and a purposeful smile: Natasha, dressed in blue. Steve’s backup; Steve’s friend, with eyes that told him to see this through, if it were important.  
  
“ _Please_ don’t go.” Steve flung wild glances around. “You—can I start over, please, Buck, I can—um, hello, can I escort you to the refreshment table, lemonade or ginger biscuits or, um, one of the chocolate éclairs, Tony’s got a marvelous chef, and I’d like to see more of you, um, Mr Barnes?”  
  
Bucky paused, caught between flight and éclairs.  
  
“I can tell you want to,” Steve said helpfully, because Steve’s mouth never knew when to shut itself, and that was precisely the too-rude sort of comment one should never make upon first acquaintance.  
  
Steve’s mouth remembered Bucky. Intimately acquainted.  
  
But Bucky didn’t. New for him.  
  
Steve contemplated strangling himself with his own cravat. At least it’d stop itching.  
  
“I can tell _you_ want to,” Bucky said, with a half-grin, like and unlike Steve’s memory: Bucky’d flirted like breathing, once. Bucky’d only had serious eyes for Steve, who’d had them right back, but charm’d been inherent in that smile. Steve, who’d known James Buchanan Barnes all his life, had never been a stranger, had never been flirted with in quite the same way.  
  
This still wasn’t that. Bucky’s eyes stayed wary despite the teasing; and yet that was teasing, that was interest. Steve’s heart gave a silly bound beneath his fancy waistcoat.  
  
Bucky tilted an eyebrow at him. “I might say yes. Your eloquence. Winning me over.”  
  
“You just want chocolate. Don’t you.”  
  
“I don’t remember how chocolate tastes.” Bucky set a white-gloved hand on Steve’s arm, accepting the escort. Every atom of Steve’s body thrilled to the touch and the trust. “But you’ve promised to introduce us, Captain Rogers. And you look like you’re about to pass out, and someone should keep an eye on you. Frail and all.”  
  
“Stunned by your charm,” Steve agreed, resting his own hand lightly over those fingers as they navigated toward the dessert towers. This was Bucky’s right hand; he’d not gotten a good glimpse of the left. “Weak in the knees. I hope you’re happy.”  
  
“Between you and me we’re one functioning person,” Bucky said cheerfully, though he glanced sideways at Steve as he said it: testing, perhaps.  
  
Steve picked up an éclair and held it out. “Pretty sure I function better with you.”  
  
Bucky’s grin became a laugh, sudden and astonished at its own existence. “What kind of function’re we talking, Captain?”  
  
Steve raised eyebrows right back. “Depends on what you—”  
  
“James.” Those tones cut through the joy like a sleek steel blade: polished and precise and expensive. “Are you pestering the good captain?”  
  
Bucky froze. Animation drained away; the laughing playful person Steve’d just been getting to know got replaced by something like one of Lord Stark’s automata. Even the new electric lights dimmed for a moment in sympathy, though that might’ve just been unpracticed wiring.  
  
Steve hated Alexander Pierce, in that moment.  
  
“Hey.” He nudged Bucky with an elbow. “Are you planning to eat that, or should I eat mine in front of you and remind you how good chocolate tastes? In excruciating detail?”  
  
Bucky breathed out. The ghost of a smile flickered windily around the corners of lips, of eyes.  
  
“Captain Rogers,” the Secretary said, “I’m sure you don’t know my ward’s circumstances, and I’ll thank you not to intervene. James—”  
  
Bucky took a bite of the éclair, shy but not scared, accepting the dare. His eyes lit up.  
  
“Stop that.” The Secretary plucked the pastry from his fingers. “You know you can’t be trusted to know what’s good for you. _I_ know what’s good for you, don’t I, James?”  
  
Bucky flinched. Bucky lowered that gaze and flinched and whispered, “Yes,” and Steve saw red and felt blood boil and gritted teeth to the breaking point. Every cliché in the book. And his heart raged inside its cage of bone.  
  
“Good boy. You know I take care of you. You need that, of course. Someone to take care of you.” Alexander Pierce regarded the éclair, sniffed in disapproval, tossed it into a potted plant. “You don’t even like chocolate. Come along now.”  
  
“I…” Bucky wavered, glancing at Steve. “I think I like chocolate. Captain Rogers said—”  
  
“You don’t know Captain Rogers. Steve,” Pierce added, beaming avuncular affability like sunny rays, an uncanny switch upon addressing the nation’s war hero, “I apologize for my ward. James hasn’t been right in the head since his injury. Brilliant at mathematics and scientific equations, but simply unable to function without care. He’ll cease to bother you.”  
  
“Bucky—” Steve said.  
  
“James,” Pierce demanded, “it is time for your medicine, come along,” and put that hand on the back of Bucky’s neck again, a man coaxing a favored dog. Bucky threw a desperate and desperately confused miserable look at Steve, but then dropped his gaze to the floor.  
  
“What sort of medicine,” Steve said, politely as possible, which wasn’t very, “is he taking? I was under the impression that he seemed quite well.” He hated talking about Bucky like a thing, like Bucky wasn’t present; but Bucky appeared to be unable to protest. And that was wrong.  
  
And Steve hated bullies.  
  
“None of your business,” Pierce returned, still pleasant, but with iron underneath. Steve began to protest; realized that to do so would cause a scene in a public ballroom; knew that he did not care on his own behalf but his team had a mission to perform—  
  
Fuck the mission, he thought. Bucky—  
  
But Captain Rogers shouldn’t think that way—  
  
“Steve,” Bucky whispered as Pierce tugged him away. “Don’t. I’m not worth—”  
  
Steve stood frozen, rooted to the spot, as a billow of dancers flooded around him in oblivious silk and muslin and pearls. Holiday music played, a carol, festive and tinsel-bright; Lord Stark’s party danced under glowing globes of light.  
  
Of course he wouldn’t leave Bucky alone.  
  
He charged off. Looking.  
  
An hour later he’d all but concluded his search to be fruitless. The Secretary might’ve left, hauling Bucky away from him; that was certainly possible. He’d run through libraries and workshops and bedrooms and coat-closets and water-closets. He’d discovered two members of the Lords in impressively athletic sexual congress, three untitled but quite well-known friends of Stark’s testing one of the automata in a workshop, Lady Elizabeth Ross reading a novel to a group of enthralled children, and a poker game that involved improbable sums of money. He had not found Bucky anywhere in Lord Stark’s extravagant townhome, and snow had begun falling outside. It landed on pathways and shrubberies like grief.  
  
He opened a door, without hope, and found a hallway.  
  
He found Bucky in the hallway.  
  
He found Bucky lying on the floor.  
  
Bucky’d fallen ashen and crumpled against a wall, as if he’d lost the strength to stand. His hair had tumbled over his eyes.  
  
Steve threw himself recklessly that way. “Buck? Come on, sit up, look at me—please, Bucky—”  
  
Bucky coughed, breathed, let his head drop onto Steve’s shoulder. “I’m all right.”  
  
“Like hell. What happened?”  
  
Bucky blinked at him dizzily. “I might’ve vomited in Stark’s water closet.” There was indeed a half-open door at the end of the hall, and a hint of porcelain.  
  
“It’s seen worse,” Steve said, which was almost certainly true. “Why—what’s wrong, should I call a physician or—”  
  
“No.” Bucky was already looking somewhat better: wan and tired, but brighter-eyed. His hair fell even more into his face as he sat up; Steve stroked it away with one shaken tender hand. “No, don’t. I—it’s my fault. I made myself do it.”  
  
“Um,” Steve said, sitting on the floor of Tony Stark’s hallway outside the water closet, holding Bucky in his arms.  
  
“The medicine he gives me,” Bucky explained. “It helps sometimes with the headaches but it makes me go away. In my head. Everything gets cold and slow and I forget more. And I didn’t want to forget. This isn’t right.”  
  
“This isn’t _right_ —” No, nothing of this was right; but for all he knew Bucky meant _this_ moment and Steve’s arms, and Steve’s heart shattered.  
  
“He lied to me.” Bucky looked up, chewed on a lip. “You came to find me. I don’t want to forget you.”  
  
“Oh.” Steve’s hands were probably digging into his shoulders too tightly. Neither of them cared. “Oh. Bucky—”  
  
“I think,” Bucky said slowly, “I do remember—you used to be smaller.”  
  
“Yes…”  
  
“Your mother’s name was Sarah.”  
  
“Yes!”  
  
“And you…” Bucky moved a hand, skimmed fingers over his own lips: they parted with wonder. “Did we…you kissed me. In the rain. Once?”  
  
“More than once,” Steve said, while the tears slid down, “come on, not memorable enough for you, I’m insulted, Buck,” and held on as tightly as he could.  
  
Bucky’d lost the gloves somewhere; he looked at both hands now, which meant that Steve looked too. Bucky’s left arm shifted and glinted and purred, an intricate mechanical flutter of shining plates and flexibility. Steve’d never seen anything like it; it was beautiful because Bucky was alive.  
  
“I’m still not him,” Bucky said softly, gazing at the hands as if seeing past and present, two sides of a divide. “I don’t remember. And I’m—this is me now. What I’ve done—I’ve done what he asked. Alex. Everything I’ve done for—he said he saved me, I owed him, I should be grateful. And I was, Steve, I was.”  
  
“I don’t care,” Steve said, and meant it. They’d have that argument many more times, he knew: Bucky was not at fault for the way Alexander Pierce had used his innate kindness and capacity for love against him. Steve would say this over and over; Steve would say this until Bucky heard. “But you said was. Past tense. What—what do you want? Now?”  
  
“I don’t want to do what he wants,” Bucky said.  
  
Steve opened his mouth to ask, and Bucky went on. “He wants me to steal Stark’s plans for the airships. The flying machines. I’m…good at understanding science. Technology. Sneaking into places without being seen. I’ll know what to copy and to memorize. I’ve lost a lot, but—that’s the same.”  
  
“You always were,” Steve said. “You liked— _like_ —science. Scientific fiction. Novels. You always—wait, _Alexander Pierce_ is the one selling our scientific secrets to war profiteers?”  
  
Bucky eyed him with the kind of amused grim determination Steve remembered. “You know about that?”  
  
“We didn’t know who.” And then he said, “Um,” because Bucky was looking at him with a sideways smirk: _we?_ “I sort of work with the Home Office.”  
  
“Yes, Captain Rogers,” Bucky said, managing to fit in an eye-roll while sitting in Steve’s arms on the floor, “I kind of got that. I want to help.”  
  
“Are you—”  
  
“Sure?” Pale eyes closed off with a snap: ice sealing over. “I don’t know much but I know I want to find out what he’s done. Everything. To everyone else. So yes, Steve, I know my own head.”  
  
“—feeling up to that,” Steve finished.  
  
“Oh.” Bucky deflated a little. “Sorry. He tells people that I’m—”  
  
“Well, you’re not,” Steve said, “I mean, okay, one time you tried to carry about three tons of books home because the shop was closing and they said you could have as many as you could take, but that’s not insanity, Bucky, that’s just you.”  
  
“You tried to help,” Bucky said.  
  
“You remember that?”  
  
“No, but you would.” Bucky grinned at him: shaky around the edges, conspiratorial, brave. Steve loved him madly and passionately and in every lifetime. “I could use tooth powder and a hairbrush. And—” He stopped. Steve had taken his hands, both hands equally, and was holding them.  
  
“And?” Steve said.  
  
“And…I forgot.” Bucky stopped, watched Steve’s face, started gradually to smile: the kind of smile that curled those lips upward like sunrise, and he curled flesh and metal fingers very gently around Steve’s in reply. “You—”  
  
“I like touching you,” Steve said. “I’ve got a plan. I think. A really bad one. Want to get up and come back to the ballroom with me?”  
  
“Why, Captain Rogers,” Bucky said, batting eyelashes, ridiculous and lovable and still a little pale, “I’m flattered. Waltz, or quadrille?”  
  
“Exposing the Secretary and giving you asylum?”  
  
“Hmm,” Bucky said, “I like this plan,” and they got up, hands remaining entwined.  
  
Out in the ballroom this season’s popular waltz had begun. Scandalously dreamy, it required both partners to dance close, sensual and slow. Steve took a deep breath, felt his heart thump. Waistcoats and cravats and espionage and Bucky’s hand in his. He could face anything, even— “May I have this dance?”  
  
“ _That’s_ your plan?”  
  
“Do you want to get away from him?”  
  
Bucky glanced down, laughed—sharp and bitter, though not at Steve—and nodded.  
  
“Okay, then. Dance with me.” He stopped. “Um. You—I mean, if you remember—”  
  
Bucky did the sarcastic eye-roll again. Steve loved him beyond all measure, beyond all words. “I know how to dance. Alex—the Secretary—ensured I knew. He wanted me skilled at a lot of things.” A tint of darkness crept in around those words, but only a tint: hope had taken up bashful residence behind those winter-sky eyes. “Can _you_ dance?”  
  
“No,” Steve said, and yanked him onto the dance floor. Pierce was heading their way.  
  
Tony’s massive electric chandeliers, dripping with crystal snowflakes for the season, twinkled overhead. Encouragement from above; from below, too, as the dance floor beckoned. Steve wanted to apologize to it; he tripped over Bucky’s feet for the second time, and gave up on finding any kind of rhythm. “Sorry!”  
  
“You weren’t kidding,” Bucky said, “you’re lucky I can, then,” and steered him adroitly out of a collision with two stern-faced baronesses in puce and tangerine satin. “Was it just so you could talk to me? The waltz.”  
  
The closeness meant they could converse, meant that Bucky could pass on information about the Secretary’s nefarious dealings, without being overheard. “No.”  
  
The thundercloud of Alexander Pierce had stormed the dance floor now. Five couples away. They’d not have a chance to speak in any case. The chandeliers swung, throwing brilliance on the moment.  
  
Bucky gazed at him, breathless from dodging Steve’s feet, curious at Steve’s answer, hopeful through skepticism.  
  
“Do you trust me?”  
  
“No,” Bucky said, and Steve’s heart broke. “But,” Bucky added, “I don’t trust anyone. And you…I don’t trust you less than I don’t trust anyone else. At the moment. He lied to me. You didn’t. And you feel…”  
  
“Right,” Steve whispered. “You feel right.”  
  
And Bucky smiled, closer to him, bodies pressed together, and oh Steve could feel that smile everyplace, glowing up and down his bones.  
  
“So,” he said, breathless too, “if I did something stupid—?”  
  
“I somehow have the feeling,” Bucky said, “that that question’s come up a lot in our relationship,” and he licked his lips, as the waltz came stumbling to a standstill, as they ceased paying attention and tripped a third time and landed safely in each other’s arms.  
  
“You’d be right about that,” Steve said, and Bucky opened his mouth to reply, and Steve kissed him.  
  
In the middle of the ballroom, in the middle of Anthony Stark’s winter extravaganza, with the eyes of Society upon them: Steve Rogers kissed Bucky Barnes. And Bucky Barnes kissed back.  
  
Bucky tasted like chocolate and hope and warm lips curving and yielding under Steve’s; Bucky started out startled but jumped right in and made a delicious tiny sound and teased Steve’s tongue with his. Steve’s hands leapt up to tangle in Bucky’s hair, to cup Bucky’s face.  
  
A young lady or two spontaneously fainted. A few older ones, veterans of Tony Stark’s parties, applauded.  
  
The Secretary swung into view, irate as a supernova. “Captain Rogers, you have no idea what you’ve done. My ward is not of sound mind—” A few shocked gasps. “And the scandal—”  
  
Steve folded a protective arm around Bucky, turned to face Alexander Pierce, glared. “Bucky and I are going to be married,” he announced—Bucky’s mouth fell open, but those pale eyes were shining—“and I’m afraid our enthusiasm got the better of us, sir.”  
  
Natasha, materializing at Steve’s side, put eyebrows up and murmured, “Congratulations.”  
  
“He’s not competent to—”  
  
“I know what I want.” Bucky’s voice came out quiet but clear. “I know that—that Lord Stark’s wine cellar makes up for his decorating taste—”  
  
“Hey,” said Tony from somewhere in the crowd. “Red and gold is festive. I’m extremely festive.”  
  
“—and I know that Secretary Pierce ordered me to find and memorize Lord Stark’s flying-machine plans so that he could sell them to certain manufacturers.” Bucky glanced at Steve, squeezed Steve’s hand. “I know I like chocolate éclairs. And I know I want to marry Captain Rogers.”  
  
“That all sounds completely competent to me,” Sam agreed, turning up on Steve’s other side. “Anyone want to dispute that?”  
  
Nobody wanted to dispute this with two veteran soldiers and Miss Romanoff, evidently. The world hung suspended: champagne and sparkling ices and Bucky’s fingers cold but firm in Steve’s.  
  
“Also,” Steve said to Alexander Pierce, “you’re under arrest,” and he added, “you bastard,” just because he could. Two of Nicholas Fury’s plainclothesmen appeared from thin air and quite competently took hold of the Secretary’s arms.  
  
“James—” Pierce said.  
  
Bucky shut his eyes, opened them, and said, “You’ll also find illegal amounts of opium and evidence of opium dealings in his office.”  
  
“You will find no such—”  
  
“Your _other_ office. Inside the unused bank vault.”  
  
Alexander Pierce’s face went pale.  
  
“Come on, sir,” one of the Home Office men said, “and congratulations, Captain Rogers,” and they took the Secretary away.  
  
Steve looked at Bucky. Bucky looked at Steve.  
  
“Well,” Tony Stark said. “I’m not sure how even I can top this party next year. But, hey, champagne for everyone, and cheers to the engaged couple, even if that one—no, sorry, both of you—might want to strangle me, but I do know how to celebrate, so. Free champagne!”  
  
As footmen began circulating with bottles, Steve picked up both of Bucky’s hands, one after the other, and kissed them: warm flesh and cool fascinating metal. “Want to get out of here?”  
  
“He did give us a good cover.” Bucky considered this act of generosity. “We should invite him to the wedding.” And his voice faltered, barely noticeable, on the final word.  
  
“Come on,” Steve said, and pulled him to the door and a coach, the old-fashioned kind with horses, summoned by Natasha, who said happily, “Fury can get you a special license by next week, Steve.”  
  
Steve glared at her—Bucky’d gone too quiet—but relented enough to put his head out the door and tell her that she’d be wearing a dress of _his_ choosing, as their attendant. She was laughing as the carriage pulled away.  
  
Bucky wasn’t laughing. Bucky’d gone a little pale again; he was curling fingers in and out, in his lap, and rubbing the metal ones over the flesh, hard enough to turn skin red. The night huddled in close around their moving carriage-world. Later Bucky would have to testify, to give evidence against the man who’d saved him; they both knew as much. Those slate-sky eyes met the carriage floor, falling from Steve’s.  
  
“Bucky,” Steve begged; pushing again, but he couldn’t not, helpless in the face of this immensity.  
  
“You kissed me,” Bucky said, lifting his head. “You said you’d marry me. In front of everyone. Society.”  
  
“Not seeing a problem with that,” Steve said. “Unless—unless you don’t—you don’t have to, you can jilt me, I’ll take the blame, I don’t care, not if you—whatever you’re comfortable with, I—”  
  
“Steve, no—” Bucky glanced down, away, out the window, and back. “I want to. I know that. I want you. But—the person you proposed to—I’m not him. Your Bucky Barnes.”  
  
“What—”  
  
“You don’t know what I’ve done,” Bucky whispered. “What I did. For him. I’m not—good, Steve, I’m not good like you, I knew he was wrong but he saved me and he took care of me and I did whatever he asked and I’m no good for you—” He held up the metal hand, then, as if that were a symbol or a shattering point. “You wanted to save me and you did, you did, but fuck, Steve—Captain Rogers—don’t throw yourself away like this, on me, don’t—”  
  
Steve stared at him, lunged forward, rapped on the driver’s partition, gave clipped orders. A new destination.  
  
“Where’re we going?”  
  
“My house.” He held out a hand. “I want you.”  
  
Bucky looked at the hand.  
  
“You idiot,” Steve added.  
  
“…what?”  
  
“I kissed you,” Steve said, “in Stark’s ballroom. What, you think I don’t know who people are when I kiss them?”  
  
“I…don’t know,” Bucky said slowly. “You go around kissing a lot of people, Steve?”  
  
“Only one,” Steve said. “Only one I want to.”  
  
The next few blocks passed in a haze. Snow fell, thick and voiceless, in fluffy heaps of white. They didn’t notice. Looking into eyes, blushing like schoolboys, catching each other and being caught. Laughing.  
  
Steve’s townhouse dwelt in the artist’s section of the bustling capital city, surrounded by the abodes of scurrying students and fervent painters and beautiful penniless models and flamboyant cross-dressing poets. He’d not decorated much; he’d not cared, not being really alive.  
  
He’d drawn, though. A little.  
  
Bucky paused in the entryway, gazing around. “That’s the rough sketch of the portrait of Maria Hill. The famous one in the National Gallery. And that one’s—”  
  
“Yes,” Steve said, “it is,” and Bucky shook his head, not really disbelieving. “I’m marrying a famous artist.”  
  
“This famous artist really wants to kiss you,” Steve said, and Bucky laughed more and turned and stepped right into his arms, no hesitation left, believing the words.  
  
Steve kissed him and drank him in; Steve ran hands along his back, spanned the lean shape of his waist, learned the cartography of him through clinging expensive fabric. Bucky murmured indistinct words and shoved his hands up under Steve’s shirt, undoing waistcoat buttons and incidentally ruining the itchy cravat along the way. Steve grinned and kept right up, wanting and being wanted, oh yes, both of them together; both of them aroused and hard together, he could feel that hot stiffness in Bucky’s trousers, and he groaned and pulled Bucky closer, crowding them against the wall; and, God, they were undoing each other in his hallway, never even making it upstairs—  
  
Bucky pulled back when Steve did. Just a hint of doubt showed in his eyes.  
  
“Just wanted to say I love your hair,” Steve said, which wasn’t the _I love you_ , not yet, but that would come; he would say it, he was saying it. And he did love Bucky’s hair, longer now and silky and disheveled as if a hurricane of artist’s fingers had run through it, which was more or less the case.  
  
Bucky arched an eyebrow like he’d heard all of Steve’s thoughts. “Only my hair? Is that why you kissed me in public and caused a scandal and proposed to me, you have a thing for the hair—”  
  
“ _This_ thing,” Steve interrupted, nudging his hip to let Bucky feel precisely what he meant, removing that last tiny doubt too, “and it loves all of you,” and Bucky said, “Oh good, ’cause that would’ve been a problem, if it’d just been me,” and somehow fit a hand down between them and cupped both their cocks, stroking together, both of them under Bucky’s caress—  
  
Steve gasped, and came _hard_ , and would’ve been embarrassed about this except that Bucky was saying his name and coming too, both of them flying to the peak abruptly and spurting in trousers like teenagers, pressed up against each other, chests heaving, bodies sticky, euphoric.  
  
“So,” Steve said, once he remembered how to talk. “Pretty sure I, um, know one thing you’ve done,” and waggled eyebrows at him.  
  
Bucky, after a split second of disbelief, burst out laughing, said, “You might have to remind me in case I forget,” and kissed him swift and sweet, other hand clinging to Steve’s shoulders as they wobbled in the aftermath.  
  
“Always,” Steve told him. “Always.”  
  
“I want chocolate éclairs at our wedding,” Bucky decided, perfect emphasis on the _our_ , so Steve kissed him one more time and said, “Of course you do.”


End file.
